In the days before a hapless studio technician erased Steely Dan’s “The Second Arrangement” in 1979, Roger Nichols, the band’s late, great longtime engineer, made a rough mix of the track on a cassette tape. The song was nearly complete. Horns and a fade would soon be added. Producer Gary Katz already was imagining it as the band’s next single. When Nichols returned to his apartment at 30 Lincoln Plaza in New York, he set the tape aside and forgot about it.
“Roger would bring home work tapes from the studio almost every night,” says Conrad Reeder, Nichols’s widow. (He died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 66 in April 2011.) “He wasn’t much into cassettes, though, because he didn’t want to hear a track at anything but the highest fidelity. So the tapes would just be lying around the house.”
The day of the “Second Arrangement” fiasco, Reeder recalls Nichols coming back from the studio hours earlier than usual. “He walked in the door and looked ashen, as if somebody had died. I was like, ‘What happened?’ He told me an assistant engineer had erased the song—everything up to the fade.”
For a time there was hope that the song could be salvaged from one of the rough mixdowns. Engineer Elliot Scheiner came forward with a mix that had been made at a lower speed setting—15 inches per second (IPS) as opposed to 30 IPS. “‘Do we want to try and overdub on that?’” he asked. “I gave them the tape, and Roger put it up and listened to it,” but the quality wasn’t quite up to the Dan’s lofty standards.
“We tried cutting the song again,” Nichols wrote in a post on an EQ magazine audio forum in 1999, “and finished it. Horns, backgrounds, lead vocal. We listened to it and Donald said, ‘NAW…scrap it!’”
At some point Nichols put the “Second Arrangement” tape into a drawer of a roll-top desk. And there it remained, undisturbed, until after his death.